When Saint Catherine addresses the audience in Jane Anderson’s new play Mother of the Maid, it’s with the easy familiarity of someone versed in the current century’s attitudes. Then she introduces us to Joan of Arc, a 15th-century farm kid having saintly visions. It’s one of the delightfully anachronistic touches Anderson created for the […]

Ariana Grande brings her Honeymoon Tour to the Times Union Center tomorrow (Friday), as the ex-tween star continues her transition to adult pop songstress. Interestingly, her “honeymoon” with public seemed in danger of ending when she was caught on security video licking the product in a doughnut shop and muttering, “I hate America,” presumably […]

Fast-rising lo-fi pop act U.S. Girls are mostly vocalist and studio deconstructionist Meg Remy, a Toronto expat who recently was signed to 4AD, and whose minimalist dance music, released on four-track tapes, has been earning critical acclaim since 2010. She’s been compared to Saint Vincent but with a militant attitude, while The […]

He’s been compared with JJ Cale and Daniel Lanois, which puts singer, songwriter and guitarist Ray Bonneville in some very interesting company. This “song and groove man” has lived the life of a bluesman: a childhood in Quebec, fighting as a Marine in Vietnam, battling addiction, earning his pilot’s license and eventually winning the […]

Long a popular L.A. band, Saint Motel have spent the last several years watching bands who once opened for them—Imagine Dragons and Young the Giant, for example—go on to play larger national venues. Their single, “My Type,” went platinum in Italy, but they never seemed to get a foothold this side of the Atlantic. All […]

Girls to the front! If you were a feminist in the ’90s, then you may remember a radical female punk movement called Riot Grrrls, and especially its onstage spearhead, Kathleen Hanna, the ferocious singer-songwriter for Bikini Kill, who ushered in new era for women musicians in rock. After a long hiatus—Hanna was incapacitated by […]

JP Harris plays country music. “Not ‘Americana,’ not ‘roots,’ ‘folk,’ or any other number of monikers used to describe a slew of spin-off genres.” JP Harris is a throwback to the classic country music sounds of Waylon Jennings and Hank Williams: Fiddles and steel guitar licks accompany authentic honky-tonk vocals as he sings songs […]